Instead Mozilla has made the curious decision to pull the plug on the long-delayed project, while offering only small clues as to why the decision was made.

The announcement was posted by Mozilla Engineering Manager Benjamin Smedberg on the Bugzilla development page. He ordered Mozilla employees and community developers:

Please stop building windows 64 builds and tests.

As for why the he opted to pull the plug on 64-bit for now, he comments, "Many plugins are not available in 64-bit versions. The plugins that are available don’t work correctly in Firefox because we haven’t implemented things like windowproc hooking, which means that hangs are more common."

Firefox 64-bit development is dead for now. [Image Source: Flickr/dimnikolov]

It not system bit mode, we need a new architecture beyond the more then 2 decades old we still stuck on x86 framework.

its not about 32bit or 64bit or even 128bit and beyond. Until the x86 falls way to a new structure, the same issues abound for both hardware and software side of the story.

Difficulty is finding a new system people would use without complaining about backwards compatibility. There is no good NEW architecture available that's none x86, that can support the global x86 world most things run on today. From a business standpoint, its why the x86 still is around for over 2 decades with no close end in sight.

"Well, there may be a reason why they call them 'Mac' trucks! Windows machines will not be trucks." -- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer